I believe in simplicity, minimalism, and have an ardent willingness to push the bounds, envisioning the betterment of usable and practical solutions.

Just imagine walking into home everyday after work wearing a pair of O2Amps, glasses that can warn you of your wife, girlfriend’s, female roommate’s, sister’s, mother’s emotions. Most importantly you can detect her emotion BEFORE you say the wrong thing. Brilliant no? By increasing our perception of blood physiology 2AI Labs have come up with the O2Amp glasses, which amplify whether a subject’s blood is oxygenated or deoxygenated, and pooled or free-flowing–or in layman’s terms determine the general emotions of their viewing subjects.

Millions of years of evolution (sorry Scientologists) have already given human beings the ability to interpret blood signals into emotions and overall states of health, like rosy cheeks for overall health, blushing for embarrassment, green for nausea and yellow for fear — or jaundice. Now, like Viagra and boob jobs, scientists have improved on mother nature again.

Mark Changizi, director of human cognition at 2AI Labs and evolutionary anthropologist explains how the glasses work with human evolutionary features, “our eyes have been optimized to sense spectral changes in skin color. It turns out you can do even better, because other parts of the spectrum that we perceive in skin are just noise. If you get rid of the noise, you’re amplifying the signal”. The technology behind the glasses is based on Changizi’s color-perception research.

O2Amps from 2AI Labs

The O2Amp glasses come in three flavors, each with their own designs that filter light in unique ways: ‘vein-finders’ that distinguish between oxygenated and de-oxygenated blood, that will help medical professionals find veins; ‘hemo-finders’ to find pools of blood or areas drained of blood, which will obviously be used for zombie finding; and ‘health-monitors’ that can distinguish between red and green and/or yellow and blue skin, which will help doctors diagnose blood-related conditions.

The ‘health-monitors’ are the most hyped ones (although personally I am excited about the ‘hemo-finders’ given the impending zombie apocalypse I keep hearing about) as they are the pair that will help people read emotions and detect health.

“If you’re angry, you get red. When you’re showing weakness, the opposite is true — your blood becomes deoxygenated and your skin appears greener,” says Changizi. “Yellow is associated with fear because the blood gets pulled out of your extremities and flows into your organs. The opposite of being yellow with fear is being blue, which your skin exhibits when you’re sedate. These are the kinds of things that are being signaled with these color signals. And whereas muscular facial expression signals can be faked, it’s harder to fake actually being red in the face with anger, or feeling weak.”

The glasses are currently sold solely to medical distributors, but they will hopefully reach the general public sometime next year. 2AI Labs are in talks currently with Oakley — so expect a decent price tag… and polarized lenses?